Universal Serial Bus

Universal Serial Bus

INTRODUCTION:

Motivation

The original motivation for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) came from three interrelated considerations:

• Connection of the PC to the telephone
It is well understood that the merge of computing and communication will be the basis for the next generation of productivity applications. The movement of machine-oriented and human-oriented data types from one location or environment to another depends on ubiquitous and cheap connectivity. Unfortunately, the computing and communication industries have evolved independently. The USB provides a ubiquitous link that can be used across a wide range of PC-to-telephone interconnects.

• Ease-of-use
The lack of flexibility in reconfiguring the PC has been acknowledged as the Achilles’ heel to its further deployment. The combination of user-friendly graphical interfaces and the hardware and software mechanisms associated with new-generation bus architectures have made computers less confrontational and easier to reconfigure. However, from the end user’s point of view, the PC’s I/O interfaces, such as serial/parallel ports, keyboard/mouse/joystick interfaces, etc., do not have the attributes of plug-and-play.

• Port expansion
The addition of external peripherals continues to be constrained by port availability. The lack of a bi-directional, low-cost, low-to-mid speed peripheral bus has held back the creative proliferation of peripherals such as telephone/fax/modem adapters, answering machines, scanners, PDA’s, keyboards, mice, etc. Existing interconnects are optimized for one or two point products. As each new function or capability is added to the PC, a new interface has been defined to address this need.
The more recent motivation for USB 2.0 stems from the fact that PCs have increasingly higher performance and is capable of processing vast amounts of data. At the same time, PC peripherals have added more performance and functionality. User applications such as digital imaging demand a high performance connection between the PC and these increasingly sophisticated peripherals. USB 2.0 addresses this need by adding a third transfer rate of 480 Mb/s to the 12 Mb/s and 1.5 Mb/s originally defined for USB.USB 2.0 is a natural evolution of USB, delivering the desired bandwidth increase while preserving the original motivations for USB and maintaining full compatibility with existing peripherals. Thus, USB continues to be the answer to connectivity for the PC architecture. It is a fast, bi-directional, isochroous, low-cost, dynamically attachable serial interface that is consistent with the requirements of the PC platform of today and tomorrow.


for more info visit.
http://www.enjineer.com/forum